''When I was 15, I got hepatitis.'' So begins Bernhard Schlink's novel ''The Reader,'' about a German student, Michael, who collapses on a sidewalk and is rescued by a woman more than twice his age. The two begin an affair. The woman, Hanna, calls Michael ''jungchen'' (''kid'') and continually asks him to read to her. Then suddenly she disappears.

Years later, as a law student, Michael discovers that Hanna has been charged with war crimes committed while she was a guard in a slave-labor camp. And he realizes Hanna has another astonishing secret. She is illiterate and so ashamed of it that she pleads guilty to writing a damaging report that she could not have written. Hanna is imprisoned, and Michael, a detached figure closed off from his emotions, helps her from a distance, sending her tapes of himself reading Homer and Chekhov.

''The Reader'' is a small, quiet, intellectual book that asks big moral questions. It has a distinctly Mitteleuropean feel, an air of allegory and moral meditation. Hardly a prescription for a best seller.

Yet ''The Reader,'' published in hardcover by Pantheon and in paper by Vintage, was No. 1 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list on Sunday for the second consecutive week. At Amazon.com it is outselling even the Monica Lewinsky biography. ''The Reader'' has been translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway from the original German and sold to Miramax for a film. To top it all, ''The Reader'' has been chosen as the selection for Oprah's Book Club.

Mr. Schlink is a professor of constitutional law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is also a justice of the Constitutional Law Court in Munster and has written treatises on moral issues, including collective guilt. He is 54, a bearer of what Germans call ''the second guilt'' of those who grew up in the shadow of their parents' generation's complicity in the Holocaust. ''The theme of collective guilt, of what the first generation did means for the second generation, has been on my mind for a long, long time,'' Mr. Schlink said.

Mr. Schlink's father, Edmund, was a professor of theology and a member of the Confessing Church, an anti-Nazi group. His mother was Swiss. In 1930 the Government shut down his father's school and he became a minister in Bielefeld, in northern Germany, where Bernhard was born. During the war the police harassed his father because of his sermons, Mr. Schlink said, ''but he was not in danger of his life.''

Growing up in postwar Germany was ''a weird experience.'' It was, Mr. Schlink said, as if the past's poisonous secrets were locked away, hidden from children, ''and only the mother has the key.'' Occasionally there were glimpses of truth. ''One of my teachers, whom I admired and to whom I owe my love of the English language, was in the SS. We saw his tattoo. There were rumors he had done something awful.''

Mr. Schlink attended Freiburg University and received his legal training at Heidelberg. A professor ''who I owe a lot to, who made me aware of how fascinating law was,'' had written an anti-Semitic book in the 30's: ''He jumped on the wagon.'' That professor's explanation made little sense, Mr. Schlink said. ''He wanted to strengthen the state against the party.''

He gave a small smile and shrugged. ''Well, I mean, they all built legends,'' he said.

During semester breaks in his student days, Mr. Schlink worked in a factory with a Romanian of German descent who came from a family of migrant workers. The man had joined the SS, but ''he just knew that he had taken part in unforgivable things,'' Mr. Schlink said.

Confronting Parents' Acts

Despite the Nuremberg trials after the war, the truth of the Holocaust did not really seem to seep into German public consciousness until the late 1950's and early 60's, especially during the Frankfurt trials of Auschwitz guards, Mr. Schlink said. ''Then interest turned to the political, military and industrial'' figures, he said. Students learned that ''many of our professors as young men entered positions from which Jews had been thrown out or driven to suicide.'' In some cases they also discovered what their parents had done.

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Mr. Schlink, who has been divorced ''for many years'' and has a son, Jan, 27, has written three mystery novels with political and moral themes. In 1987 he published a paper, ''Questions of Law, Guilt and Future After the Third Reich.'' He searched first-century Germany tribal law for precedents on collective guilt. When a person committed murder, his tribe could expel him, Mr. Schlink said. ''Then, they didn't have to deal with it. But if they kept him within their solidarity, then the guilt fell on the whole tribe.''

Germans, he said, ''by not expelling the perpetrators, by keeping in, by accepting them as judges, administrators, professors and politicians,'' share the guilt for their crimes. But the problem for the second generation is that ''you can't expel your parents,'' he said; therefore ''you are within that collective guilt, too.''

While a visiting professor in East Germany in 1990, Mr. Schlink was flooded with childhood memories. East Germany reminded him of the West in the 50's, he said, with ''the grayness,'' the sense of impoverishment, and he began to write ''The Reader.'' It was published in Germany in 1995. Reviews have for the most part been highly favorable. In The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it ''arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex.''

But Cynthia Ozick had harsh words for the book in the March issue of Commentary. She particularly took issue with the illiteracy of Hanna, the war criminal. ''Germany before World War II was known to have the most educated population in Europe, with the highest standards of literacy,'' she wrote. In making Hanna illiterate, Ms. Ozick said, ''the grotesquely atypical turns out to be, in this work by a member of the shamed and remorseful second generation, a means of exculpation.''

Is Hanna's illiteracy a metaphor implying that Germans perpetrated the Holocaust simply out of ignorance?

''I know education doesn't protect against committing crimes,'' Mr. Schlink said. Many Germans in units sent to kill Jews in occupied territory were educated, he noted. ''It's much easier for an intellectual to come up with a legend'' to delude others, or themselves, he said. Hanna in her illiteracy stands naked in her wrongdoing.

In the end, Hanna does a kind of penance. ''The book said she was in prison, as in a convent,'' said Mr. Schlink. She learns to read. But on the brink of release she kills herself, leaving her small estate to the daughter of one of her Jewish victims. Does Mr. Schlink believe Hanna paid the full price for her crimes? No, he said; her suicide marks ''a last and final step in her withdrawal from the outer world.''

The Dead Cannot Forgive

Forgiveness, said Mr. Schlink, can only come from those you have wronged. ''You can't get forgiveness from someone you have killed.''

As for the hero, Michael, he is frozen inside, ''because he never confronts her or his guilt, his entanglement'' in the past.

''He kept himself from fully maturing, Mr. Schlink said. ''In a way he really stayed jungchen,'' the boy Hanna had seduced.